♪ KENT WESTBROOK: There's something about collecting that just is kind of in your blood.

I'm interested in seeing things that haven't been seen for hundreds or thousands of years, letting them be a window into the people that lived here before.

My name is Kent Westbrook.

I'm a professor of surgery at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

I've been collecting now 65 years.

I have collected primarily just Arkansas artifacts.

These are, like, 3,000 years old.

This piece is what's called a spud.

And it's actually from out by the airport here in Little Rock.

My dad had a little sack that was what was a bank deposit sack then.

And in that sack, he had about 20 arrowheads that he had gotten when he was growing up down at Fouke, Arkansas.

So I asked him about them, and he told me they were made by the Indians, and that you found them on the ground.

So by the time I was 13 or 14, I would ride my bicycle to hunt arrowheads.

And my dad and I probably found 5,000 arrowheads over five or 10 years that we hunted together.

Probably my favorite pot is what's called "The Startled Fawn."

That is probably the best pot ever discovered in the southeastern United States.

This was a book that I'm very proud of.

This was prepared for an art exhibit that we did at the museum here in Little Rock years ago.

And it was the first time that pottery from this region had been displayed as an art form.

Now, the Institute of Art in Chicago held a very big exhibit a few years ago, and kind of patterned it on what we did in the 1980s.

My dad and mother were pretty attractive people.

Either that or somebody did a good job with the camera and some touch-up.

[laughing] The thing that appeals to me is, I see something that someone handled 5,000 years ago, and nobody may have seen it until I saw it.

Whatever you see there tells you something about that person and that culture that made it.

Here's a plummet.

That's a plummet.

And these are banner stones.

This is a grooved axe.

When you set him down, he stands up as if he were fighting.

Most turtles are made like this, where they're just on their all fours.

These little beads, though, are something that, really, I have the biggest collection of them in the country.

But there aren't many people interested in them.

That one was actually found, oh, about 10 miles from Little Rock.

Took me about 20 years to get it from the fella that I got it from.

He was a patient of mine, and he called me one day and said he wanted to buy a racing bicycle.

And if I would give him enough money to buy a racing bicycle, he would give me the banner stone.

So that's how I got it.

You know, everyone can't go out and hunt arrowheads.

But you can learn about the people that lived here before us.

And there are at least three state parks that are set up for that.

One of them is Toltec, between Little Rock and England.

One is at Parkin, and one is up at Wilson, Arkansas-- the Hampson Museum.

And then, there's a very good museum up at Bentonville, Arkansas-- the Museum of Native American History-- which is absolutely superb.

One of the main problems in trying to collect artifacts is fakes.

Now, I can tell 90% of the time.

And so there are people that would go to great effort to make one and try to age it.

Now, there is a test that you can do called thermoluminescence that has to do with isotopes that develop out of the air.

There was a small site that I'd been finding a few arrowheads on that had never been plowed.

And one year, they plowed it to put wheat on it.

And it came a rain, and so I went out there.

I was able to drive by this time-- I was 16 or 17.

And I drove out there, and I found about 40 arrowheads and four or five axes, a little bit of broken pottery, and this.

I didn't know what it was, but I knew it was the best rock I'd ever found.

When I got close to home, I started honking the horn.

And my sisters and my mother and dad thought something bad had happened.

When I showed them my rock, they weren't all that impressed, because they weren't into rocks like I was.

But that's the best rock that I ever found.

You know, none of my family cares anything about this stuff.

It's just rocks and pots.

Some people love it.

Some people don't.

But I could get interested in gold watches.

I think they're pretty.